Taking Blockchain beyond Bitcoin - The Trusted IoT Alliance formed to promote Blockchain to the IoT

A new IoT organisation - The Trusted IoT Alliance - has been formed with the aim of furthering a “blockchain-based Internet of Things (IoT) open-source working group". Blockchain is basically a distributed ledger system, so every part of the system can check up on changes made (or not) in other parts of the system. Like a paper-based, double entry ledger, the idea is that tampering and falsification becomes more difficult to do and easier to discover.

The alliance wants to promote Blockchain as a timely fix for the Internet of Things, which currently has a huge security image problem. The alliance says that while blockchain is usually associated with cryptocurrencies (in particular Bitcoin) its uses can go way beyond dubious applications such as money laundering. It can be used to underpin all sorts of critical processes such as securing voting records and storing legal documents.

So it says its mission is to “leverage blockchain infrastructure to secure and scale IoT ecosystems.”

IoT systems, it says, operating in heterogeneous and decentralized environments, and consisting of multiple administrative domains, represent a challenge from the point of view of trust.”

It says it wants to “enable trust in the data produced by such IoT systems in a distributed ledger/blockchain agnostic fashion, thereby enabling a decentralized trust model for interoperable digitized identities of physical goods, documents, immobilized assets, sensors, and machines. Finally, we wish to see this happen with the resiliency that can scale to support billions of connected devices”

It’s planned to work with open source communities and produce open source code to further the spread of Blockchain

The alliance claims that so far Bosch, BNY Mellon, Cisco, Gemalto, US Bank along with Bitse, Chronicled, ConsenSys, Ledger, Skuchain, Slock.it, HCM International of Foxconn Group, IOTA, Oaken Innovations, Qtum, Chain of Things, and Big Chain DB are on-board with the project.